My name is Greg Cruey... and I'm a blogaholic. I have other blogs. This blog covers a number of topics - politics, personal stuff, life in Appalachia (since I live there), languages and linguistics, the Internet and blogging, philosophy and religion, places I've been (or want to go), and whatever else I think about when I should be sleeping...

Thursday, December 13, 2007

I spent today at a workshop on autism. It was the second such workshop in a series of four presented by the West Virginia Autism Training Center at Marshall University. Like most such workshop, this series is not purely informational. It is designed to promote an approach to dealing with autism in the classroom (and other settings). The approach is called Positive Behavior Support.

Autism has been in the news a lot over the past couple of years. A number of controversies surround the disorder - chief among them is the increase in the number of cases of autism being reported. Thirty years ago autism was a relatively rare condition that ordinary people knew little about. Many medical professional either considered it a form of mental retardation or (worse) simply mistook it for mental retardation. Today the most common estimate is that one in every 166 children is born with autism. Since four out of every five cases of autism occur in boy, that means that about one out of ever 415 girls is born with autism and one our of about every 103 boys is born with autism.

Why are there more cases now? That question could start fist fights. On the one hand is the suggestion that, just maybe, the biggest reason is that we've learned to recognize autism better and the second biggest reason is that we've changed who gets to keep the count. Under this theory, we've always had about this many autistic children, we just called them something else - mentally impaired, or learning disabled, or emotionally disturbed. The reported number of cases is also up because before the 1990's doctors, for the most part, reported on the number of autism cases; under the Child Find provisions of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), schools took over the responsibility of reporting the statistics. And it became an obligation - not just to report cases that showed up, but to go out and find those children and identify them.

The definition of autism has also been altered and expanded along the way. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the book doctors use to identify autism. The definition in the DSM-III published in 1980 differed from that in DSM-IIIR published in 1987. It was changed again in the DSM-IV(TR) published in 1994.

Other disorders, like Asperger Syndrome, have been grouped together as being related in some way to autism. And when a child doesn't quite meet the definition of autism, professionals will describe the child as falling under the umbrella of "autism spectrum" - disorders that can't be clearly identified but resemble autism.

The workshops have been interesting. The first one was mostly an introduction. among the topics that got floated and discussed: the genetics of autism, the possibility that autism is an evolutionary adaptation (not sure I buy that), the question of whether famous people are autistic (Bill Gates was mentioned), and more.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

The concept of a spiral curriculum has changed the way I teach. I suspect that the concept will change the way most teachers teach before too much longer. And special needs students will benefit from that.

A couple of years I was introduced to a concept in teaching that, for me (and most of the other teachers in my building), was almost entirely new. The concept, the idea, is at least as old as I am. It is called a spiral curriculum.

Let me compare a spiral curriculum to the more tradition approach to teaching that people are used to. The basic idea behind the tradition approach is that the time has come for something: fractions, gerunds, state capitals, the Third Law of Thermodynamics - whatever. Because the time has come, we're going to learn it. Maybe that means we're going to memorize it (like with state capitals). Maybe that means we're going to develop a skill with it (like the addition of fractions with like denominators). Maybe that means we're going to grasp how it affects us. But whatever it means, the time is now - for EVERYONE. We're going to work on it for a while. The kids are going to learn it NOW. And then we're going to move on to the next thing that the time has come for...

In contrast, a spiral curriculum begins with the assumption that children are not always ready to learn something. Readiness to learn is at the core of a spiral curriculum. And instead of focusing for relatively long periods of time on some narrow topic whose time has come, a spiral curriculum tries to expose students to a wide varies of ideas over and over ago. For a select few, the time for gerunds and infinitives has already arrived by the second grade. And for a few, algebra and geometry make perfect sense by grade three. A spiral curriculum, by moving in a circular pattern from topic to topic within field like, say, math, seeks to catch kids when they first become ready to learn something and pick up the other kids, the ones not ready to learn yet, later - the next time we spiral around to that topic.

Why isn't a spiral curriculum a circular curriculum? Because it doesn't stay at the same difficult level as time goes by....

And it is with math that I became involved in a spiral curriculum. My school district began this year implementing a curriculum developed at the University of Chicago called Everyday Math. From the very early grades students are introduced to ideas from algebra, geometry, statistics, measurement, patterns, and so on. The challenge for the teacher? Simple: stay on track. The first time you try and explain what a variable is, NO ONE gets it. You spend the day that the book says to on it and you MOVE ON.

And THAT is HARD for someone from a traditional background. Looking at a group of kids and saying, "No one understood. Some of them will get it next time..." is hard for someone from a traditional teaching background. But there will be a next time. And a next time after that. So if Billy or Suzie isn't ready for converting improper fractions to mixed numbers this week, NOW, that's okay.